Mental Immersion Quotes

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .

When you trance out properly, when you're completely in that world, there is no other world, so there's no conflict.

I enjoy putting my mind into different situations rather than my body.

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

I don't have a cellphone or a computer. I deliberately circumscribe my mental life within the periods that I write about, and the power of Perfidia is that it's the result of complete immersion. I was there for the two years that it took me to write that book.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

Sometimes I go outside after a long stretch of writing and I'm surprised it's not raining. Or that it's daylight. Or that it's not the middle of winter. I don't know if that level of immersion is normal, but it's now I do things. I like it. It works well for me.

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity...In a state of flow, you're neither bored nor anxious, and you don't question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing.

Optimal experience is that rare occasion when we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.

I went to see 'The Piano' with Holly Hunter when I was in a Paula Vogel play, and I was just gone. I couldn't focus at all. It took that creative part of my brain with it so absolutely.

Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.

I get very involved in the internal logic of sentences.

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film.

When I'm meditating on an idea, I try to let the idea completely saturate me to the point where I feel like I'm covering myself in it or totally immersing myself in it, so that everywhere I'm looking, everywhere I'm going, it's through the lens of that idea. And that's sort of what I do with the music - I try to lose myself in it.

You know a movie is good when things that are unreal have gotten into your head, and now your day is not the same.

You know that something is really well written when you have to think so little about the words that are coming out of your mouth and you're able to dwell in your own headspace to get there. It's very easy to recall and remember because it's written so well.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

I find the experience of keeping a journal much more creative on paper than on a computer. When I write, I'm physically immersed in the world and slow down, whereas on screen, I use my senses in a less engaged way - and I skim more.